A Century Ago Today, an Anarchist tried to Kill Chicago's Archbishop with Soup

The "laboratory of death"

We now have an Archbishop with "soup" in his name. Four generations ago we had an Archbishop with arsenic in his soup.

From today's Chicago Tribune (via a reminding tweet from Amy Welborn):

It was almost the crime of the century. 

But now that a century has passed, the banquet soup poisoning of 1916 has virtually disappeared from Chicago's memory. 

On Feb. 10 — 100 years ago today — a few hundred of the city's most prominent people gathered at the stately University Club at the corner of Michigan and Monroe for a dinner welcoming the new Roman Catholic archbishop, George Mundelein. 

Illinois Gov. Edward Dunne was there, along with former Gov. Charles Deneen, former Chicago Mayor Carter Harrison Jr., utility czar Samuel Insull, bishops, bank presidents, judges and the superintendent of schools. 

All were marked for assassination by an anarchist cook named Jean Crones, who spiked the soup stock with arsenic. 

When dinner was served, some of the highest fliers of Chicago were laid low, falling to the floor, groaning in agony and vomiting. But none of them died, and there are various theories why. 

According to one story, an expanded guest list forced the kitchen to water down the soup, thereby diluting the poison. By another account, a kitchen worker thought Crones' soup stock had spoiled and threw out most of it, replacing it with fresh stock. Still others believe that the soup contained too much arsenic, not too little, and that the overdose caused the guests to quickly vomit and thus survive. Yet another theory is that the diners were saved by a quick-thinking doctor who mixed mustard and water and served it as an emetic, inducing the soup eaters to expel the perilous broth. 

Mundelein, who showed no ill effects, may have been too busy meeting and greeting to do much eating. "You know it takes something stronger than soup to get me," said the archbishop, who would later become a cardinal and have a Chicago suburb named after him. 

The anarchist cook fled the city, leaving his chemical supplies in his South Side boarding house room, which the Tribune described as a "laboratory of death." 

For years afterward, the hunt for the religion-hating radical generated headlines. Letters purportedly from Crones were sent to The New York Times, expressing regret that 100 diners weren't killed. The signature of Jean Crones on a bathroom wall in Waukesha, Wis., was "found to be identical with the poisoner's handwriting," according to the Tribune. A man playing pool in Nebraska was arrested because he resembled Crones. And Chicago police officers rushed to Pittsburgh to check out a tip that Crones was hiding there disguised as a nun. 

Turns out, the name Jean Crones was a pseudonym. The nefarious cook was really Nestor Dondoglio, a follower of Italian anarchist firebrand Luigi Galleani. Like the failed soup poisoner, Galleani suffered frustrations as a terrorist. He once published a bomb-making guide that contained an error, causing his comrades to blow up when they followed his instructions. 

Never captured despite the nationwide dragnet, Dondoglio died quietly in 1932 in Connecticut, where he had found haven with friends.